Nature Gardens at NHM: LA's Urban Nature

I've been waiting an entire month to write this post, and maybe my entire life to entomologically riff off a Talking Heads song title! On Monday, October 1, I found a large tarantula hawk wasp (a.k.a Pepsis wasp) on some flowering Baccharis in the North Campus. This blue wasp﻿ with orange wings was the first of its kind spotted in our new gardens, and is indeed a spider killer.

Tarantula Hawk on Baccharis

This is what Insects of the Los Angeles Basin has to say about tarantula hawks preying on spiders:

"When a female wasp finds a tarantula, she alights and engages it in battle. The wasp then stings the spider on the underside between the legs and usually succeeds in paralyzing but not killing it....